Tony Judt Quotes
I don't believe that one should have one-size-fits-all moral rules for international political action.
Judt, Tony, and Timothy Snyder. Thinking the Twentieth Century. Penguin Press, 2012.
This is a very important quotation. No one likes to make moral compromises, but Mann realized that there was a necessity in a complex society—especially a republic to make compromises. Politics cannot function without compromises of all kinds moral and otherwise as different people have different views of morality and rectitude. Mann observed that if compromises must be made, it is better for the politicians to make them than the educators, physicians, clerics, and other professional groups. Therefore politics takes the heat so that the other institutions of society do not have to. Thus politics has this crucial role among its others according to Mann.
This quotation is an excellent example of a kind of political statement that sounds terrific at first, but when you think about it, it is hard to determine what it means. It is clearly some kind of criticism of international and multinational organizations but it is impossible to know what the candidate is proposing. He does not urge that the US not participate in the multilateral organizations? He warns that when we do participate, we should not cede our moral authority to them. But no one can determine had a sovereign nation like the United State cedes any moral or other kind of authority by participating in these organizations.
Bunch was the undersecretary-general of the United Nations who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his mediation efforts in the Middle East. Archie Roosevelt and his extreme right wing associates thought that anyone who worked in the UN was a communist and had no respect for the Norwegian Nobel Prize Committee. In the spirit of Archie Roosevelt’s father, the Theodore Roosevelt made the award to Buche and ignored Archie’s slanderous attack. Surprising to most people who know of President Theodore Roosevelt’s general liberal views, his 4th son was an ultraconservative who founded and joined racist, anti-Semitic, right wing organizations, and to the distress of many in the family and without lent his name to many of the most extreme right wing causes and organizations.
Chavez frequently insulted officials and leaders of other countries. See linked quotes for examples.
Tony Robert Judt FBA was an English-American historian, essayist and university professor who specialised in European history. Judt moved to New York and served as the Erich Maria Remarque Professor in European Studies at New York University, and Director of NYU's Erich Maria Remarque Institute. He was a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books. In 1996 Judt was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2007 a corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.
